The Seal Lullaby
by Dearheart
Summary: [He's not six anymore, and I lost the right to hold him when I pushed him back into the war. This is what it did to him. What I did to him.] In which Valentine helps her brother ride out a nocturnal panic attack, confronts some guilt issues of her own, and they both take another baby step towards restoring the closeness they once had.


**A/N:** (WARNING - this is long and angsty and _extremely_ self-indulgent and my attempts to Orsonify my writing style are pretty lame. I'm so sorry.) This takes place during "Ender In Exile", between chapters 11 and 13. BUT reading that book isn't necessary to get the gist of this; there's only a couple references to it. =) Feedback is always appreciated!

**Song Inspiration:**  
**-** _The Seal Lullaby_ arranged by Eric Whitacre  
**-** _Say My Name_ by Within Temptation  
**-** _Heroes_ by Mika

* * *

_You have no idea what a relief it is to me that there is someone who shares this with me. …This letter is my first exercise in genuine candor since I talked to you on the lake in North Carolina so long ago. Oh, wait. It was only three years. Less? Time is so confusing. Thank you for being with me, Valentine. I can only hope that I can keep it from being a meaningless exercise that takes us back to Eros in stasis, with eighty years of human history gone and absolutely nothing accomplished except my being defeated by a bureaucrat. _ **–Ender**

-:-

For the most part Ender's sleep was quiet, if occasionally restless. Some tossing and turning. A name or unintelligible word muttered under his breath. Valentine could only remember one time that he woke up screaming. She never asked him about his dreams anymore; he preferred to deal with them alone (like he dealt with everything else), and the emails his "jeesh" sent her had given her plenty of insight into the psychological hell he'd been through.

But whatever was in his head tonight, it was worse than usual. And hearing her brother cry brought on an onslaught of old guilt she wasn't prepared for.

She wasn't sure how Ender chose to remember their day on the lake; but to her, it would always be a reminder of how his manipulators used her against him - and how she willingly complied with it. Valentine never told anyone, but she'd had a nightmare of her own after that visit. She dreamed she was back on the raft with him, and they were drifting along the edge of a roaring whirlpool in the middle of the lake. They were both standing, watching the water swirling into the darkness. When Ender turned to face her, she lifted one finger…slowly, lovingly…and pushed him in. The image of him screaming and struggling as the whirlpool sucked him down haunted her for weeks afterward.

Valentine wasn't one to dwell on things she couldn't change, and she knew that every choice and manipulation had eventually turned out for the best. Even if the best wasn't the happiest. But in the deeper places of her heart - where she was bound to Ender as sister, keeper, friend - the regret was still alive. For a long time it had lain dormant and tucked away, only stirring in rare instances that were easy to brush off.

But now, hearing Ender's anguish, the guilt resurfaced cold and heavy in her chest. She called the voice command to raise the screen between their beds and ducked underneath as it lifted, anxious to reach him. He was tangled in the sheets, fighting desperately against some unseen ghost; and for a sickening moment it felt like she was staring into the whirlpool again, watching him drown.

She called his name, grasping his shoulder to shake him awake. Ender struggled and knocked her arm away, bolted upright, panting, sobbing. The raw terror and pain in his eyes struck her like a blow to the gut.

"Ender?" She reached out a hand towards him but he flinched back, as if her touch would burn him…or if _he_ were the firebrand that would burn her.

"I hit you." Both his voice and his body were trembling. His face was flushed and tearstreaked; and Val had to fight back the instinct to take him in her arms and trace soothing circles on his back the way she used to when they were children.

He's not six anymore, and I lost the right to hold him when I pushed him back into the war, she thought bitterly. This is what it did to him. What _I _did to him.

"You didn't hit me," she said, sitting on the edge of his bed. He was shaking so badly she could feel it through the mattress.

"Yes I did, I felt it."

"It was only a push, Ender. You were moving in your sleep. Look, see my arm? No red marks. No bruises. You didn't hurt me. Everything's fine."

A choked, broken noise escaped his throat and his eyes squeezed shut, another wave of tremors sweeping over him. He moved to the other side of the bed, pressing his back to the wall and curling his fingers in the bedsheets until they whitened at the knuckles, desperate to anchor himself. His breathing still came in shallow gasps.

Valentine began to worry. "Do you need a medic?"

"Panic attack," he gritted out. "I'm fine. It'll pass."

"So this has happened before."

Ender swallowed and nodded.

"Do you want me to stay with you?"

He nodded again, then groaned and thumped the back of his head against the wall behind him. She could still see tears on his cheeks but he made no effort to wipe them away, too preoccupied with the overload of fight-or-flight responses surging through his body.

Seeing his composure shatter like this was unnerving. Over the past several months, Val had gotten so used to the warm, charming, outgoing Ender who could win hearts and smooth over arguments with just a smile and a few well-chosen words. She was well aware that his happiness was an act - just as much as their sweet, innocent sibling-duo-being-buddies-with-Captain-Morgan was an act. But Ender made it so _constant_ and hid everything else so deeply that it was too easy to forget how fresh the wounds in him still were.

A long half-minute had passed. She couldn't bear to just sit there watching anymore.

Ender was still trembling and one of his hands was clutched at his chest, as if trying to keep his heart from bursting out. He was forcing himself to breathe slower. Deep, uneven breaths, in and out. Valentine inched a little closer to him, and this time, when she reached out and touched one of his bare feet, he didn't recoil from her.

"What do you need, Ender?" she said softly.

"Just…keep talking. Hearing your voice is helping."

"What should I talk about?"

"Anything." He sucked in another gulp of air, held it, shakily let it out. "I just need something other than the pounding in my throat to focus on."

"All right," she said, feeling stupid because of course _now_ her mind was going blank.

But as she wracked her brain for a topic to distract him with, her mother's voice brushed through her thoughts: "_Ender likes to be reminded of good things." _She remembered crowding on the bed with Mother when they were little – herself on one side, toddler Ender on the other, Peter lying on his stomach at the foot of the bed with chin in hands – and an old, well-loved, hardcover book with gold letters on the front. She could hear the rustle of the first pages turning, and almost by reflex, she began to say the words along with the voice in her memory:

"'In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell; nor a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat. It was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.'"

"Tolkien," Ender murmured.

"Let's make a game out of this," said Valentine, seizing the idea as it came to her. "I'll quote lines from our favorite bedtime stories, and you tell me the authors that go with them."

"What if I can't remember?"

"Oh, you will. I'll make them easy. Like this one: 'He was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge.'" She lowered her voice and wriggled her fingers like claws. "'A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old _sinner_.'"

Ender croaked out a laugh. "Good old Charles Dickens." Valentine mentally patted herself on the back. Even one weak chuckle was a good sign.

She smiled at him and pressed on. "See? That wasn't hard. Now try this one: 'Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted, persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished, persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.'"

"Mark Twain."

"Good. 'There once was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrub, and he almost deserved it.'"

"C. S. Lewis."

And on they went, through Beatrix Potter and Uncle Remus and Lewis Carroll and Frances Hodgeson Burnett and all the timeless storytellers that had put some much-needed magic into their childhood. Ender kept his eyes closed in concentration as he spoke each name, quirking his lips in amusement whenever Val quoted something funny; and she watched in relief, minute by minute, as his body relaxed and the surges of adrenaline faded into little hiccupping aftershocks. The worst was over.

Head bowed, shoulders slumped, eyes weary but clear again, Ender pressed a couple of fingers to his neck to check his heartrate. "Madeleine L'Engle."

"Molto bene," said Valentine. "One more?"

"One more," he agreed.

Valentine knew the perfect poem to finish with, and it also happened to be a lullaby. Her voice wasn't anything special, but she could carry a tune, and the words for this one were very dear. She cleared her throat before beginning:

"_Oh hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us;_  
_And black are the waters that sparkled so green._  
_The moon, o'er the combers, looks downward to find us_  
_At rest in the hollows that rustle between_…"

It was a sweet melody, a wistful melody; and Valentine had always loved how it captured the feeling of calm, deep water, rising and falling in gentle waves. Ender sighed quietly as she sang and rested his forehead on his knees, arms clasping beneath them, like he could tuck himself into the song and never come out.

She didn't blame him. She could feel herself getting lost in it, too.

"_Where billow meets billow, then soft be thy pillow._  
_Ah, weary wee flipperling, curl at thy ease._  
_The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee,_  
_Asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging seas;_  
_Asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging seas_."

She lingered on the last note, savoring it before letting it fade. The silence after felt sacred, and almost enchanted; as though the lullaby had frozen the moment and suspended it in time. Neither wanted to be the first to speak and break the spell.

But at last, Ender said the name: "Rudyard Kipling." He raised his head from his knees, and the nostalgia in his eyes matched her own. "'The Seal Lullaby.' I forgot how beautiful the tune was."

"Remember that big treasury book of Rudyard Kipling stories we used to have? Whenever we cracked open that book, you always made me or Mom turn to 'The White Seal' and sing the poem at the beginning. You loved that lullaby."

"And still do. Though the story itself had some pretty violent moments."

"Don't they all?"

"I always thought the ending of the final battle was a little sad. All of the White Seal's fur was stained red. Bloody from head to tail. Not so nice to look at anymore."

"But he also led all the other seals to safety. And they never had to live in fear of the hunters again."

They'd had this conversation before, in different words. But it always ended the same – either Ender would change the subject, or drop the discussion completely and fall silent, staring at nothing. Tonight, it was the latter.

Valentine knew not to push him any further. "How are you feeling?"

"Much better," said Ender, "now that my head isn't swimming and my heart isn't pounding 140 beats a minute."

"You don't have attacks like this often, do you?"

"Not big ones, no. Not anymore. My last one was back on Eros. And usually I could handle them myself; but then, not many of them were this intense. I've never had one triggered in my sleep before. That was…interesting."

"'Interesting'. Of all the words you could use to describe a panic attack, _that's_ the one you pick."

"I know. I'm such a poet."

Then the irony faded. A flicker of insecurity crossed Ender's face and he looked down, following the wrinkles in the bedsheets with one finger.

Valentine suddenly felt awkward and anxious herself. Sending a letter to tell me his plans was one thing, but this? I just saw my little brother fall apart for the first time in years, and it wasn't because he_ let_ himself be vulnerable. He had no control over this, no warning, no choice over whether or not I could see the damaged part of him. The door was wrenched off its hinges and I had to be the one to help put it back in place this time. And now he doesn't know what to feel.

What if he doesn't really want to rebuild our bond at all? What if he _never_wants to?

But when he lifted his eyes again, they were warm and grateful; and she could see something else in them too. A shift. Another tiny amount of trust won back.

"Thanks," said Ender quietly.

"I'm your sister," said Valentine, quirking a sad smile at him. "This is supposed to be my job."

"And you feel like you're failing at it."

She looked away. "You know that I haven't merely failed you. I betrayed you. I chose humanity's wellbeing over yours."

"And it's a good thing you did, or who knows where humanity would be in the next few hundred years."

Valentine shook her head. "I helped Peter achieve his dreams, then turned around and convinced you to dive back into your nightmare. To finish a war that I knew would hurt you; had _already_ hurt you. They broke you and I _let_ them. And as icing on the cake, I made it impossible for you to ever come home, to see your own parents again—"

"That was just as much Peter's doing, and from your perspective it was the lesser of the two evils—"

"And I didn't even give you a choice. I just did it. Sometimes I'm still amazed you don't hate me."

"Val," chuckled Ender, "you could literally throw me under a bus and it still wouldn't make me hate you. I'm not capable of hating you."

She wanted to say: _"You're not capable of hating anyone except yourself, and I only wish I was as good as you believe."_ But she knew if she talked anymore, she'd start crying, and she _refused_ to cry right now. This is supposed to be about Ender, not me. Save the tears and the disgusting self-pity for later.

He scooted over to sit next to her on the edge of the bed. "Even if the sister part of you regrets talking me into Command School – and it _had_ to be done, Val – you can't regret why you did it. You had a duty to Earth. The survival of our entire species was at stake, for all we knew. That was the whole point."

"And that justifies everything," she said, voice shaking, too angry to decide if her words were a question or a bitter statement. "That justifies ripping my brother away and twisting him into a weapon he never wanted to be. That justifies how I played Judas, turning you in with a kiss—"

"You weren't Judas," said Ender, taking her hands in his and squeezing them in emphasis. "You were Abraham, putting me on the altar for a higher calling."

"But there was no angel to save you," whispered Valentine.

"No," said Ender. "But at least you're here now. And I'm glad." He looked at her with so much love that she couldn't bear it. "I'm so glad you're with me. And I know it hasn't been easy, but I promise that everything I'm able to give you, I am giving. It's only a fraction of what you want, but…"

She put a hand over her mouth, struggling to keep herself together, fighting so hard against the tears that she barely noticed when Ender pulled her into a hug. But as she felt his arms around her, she wondered: What if giving others comfort is the only way he can allow himself to receive it? He's still so wrapped up in his own guilt that any well-meaning attempt to forgive or console or excuse what he did burns him, shuts him down. Perhaps, in some roundabout way, letting him comfort me is the closest I can come to directly comforting him myself right now.

So she let herself cry.

Ender cradled her head against him, rocking gently and stroking her hair, tracing patterns of circles on her back – all the same little things she used to do, years ago, when Peter abused him – and it only made Valentine cry harder, furious with herself. Everything in her gut was twisting, screaming, this is wrong, it should be _me_ doing this, it should be _me_ rubbing his back and holding him while he cries, this is backwards, this is stupid, this is _all wrong_…

"No, it's not," said Ender, and she realized she'd been muttering her thoughts out loud.

"Yes it is," she gasped through her tears. "I came to be here for you. _You're_ supposed to be the one crying on my shoulder right now."

"I did that plenty of times in the past. It's about time I returned the favor."

"But you have so much more to cry about than I do!"

"Just because your pain is different from mine doesn't mean it's lesser. You're allowed to hurt, too."

"I know saying it won't fix anything, I know it won't fix you, but I'm _sorry_," she sobbed, clutching his shoulder. "I'm sorry I let them do this to you and I'm sorry I was part of it and I'm sorry I can't fix this, I'm so sorry Ender…"

"Peace," he hushed, pressing his hand firm against her back while his other arm tightened around her, keeping her steady and still. "Peace."

She could feel the strength in his embrace flowing into her, calming the emotions spinning out of control in her head, quieting her spirit until the only things that mattered were breathing and feeling the solid support of her brother holding her.

After she hiccupped through the last few sobs, Ender kissed her hair and murmured, "I forgave you a long time ago, you know."

"You shouldn't have," she whispered back.

"Maybe you're right," he said. "I have too much blood on my hands, so I'm not really in any place to dish out forgiveness to anyone. But I'm going to anyway."

"Stupid over-compassionate idiot."

"Yeah, well, don't know _who_ I learned that from."

"Oh yes," snorted Valentine, pulling away to wipe her eyes. "I'm the perfect role model. It's so compassionate to sell out the decent brother and get in cahoots with the terrible one."

Ender sighed. "Val, what did I just tell you?"

"Just because you've forgiven me doesn't mean _I've_ forgiven me yet. You of all people should know how impossible that can be, Ender Wiggin."

"Touché."

"And now that we've both had our turns being emotional wrecks tonight…" She trailed off into a yawn, rubbing at the heaviness in her eyes again. "Crying is exhausting. I'm going back to bed, and so should you."

"Probably," said Ender. "Unless…"

"Unless?"

He hesitated a moment, as if debating with himself; then gave her a secretive, knowing look and asked, "Are you cold?"

Cold? Their room was climate controlled; she _never_ felt cold.

Except he wasn't talking about the temperature. His words took her far back to when he was two or three years old, scared of a thunderstorm or a bad dream, and he would sneak into her room after Peter fell asleep. She always sat up when she heard the door open and she'd see Ender standing there, a tiny shivering silhouette in the hallway light, and every time she asked him, "Are you cold?" he would nod wordlessly and climb into bed with her, curling into her arms as she pulled the covers over them both. The phrase had never been a question, but an invitation. A gift of care and closeness.

And now once again the positions were switched and Ender, despite _still_ being the one plagued by monsters, was offering this gift to her.

He doesn't really want to, Valentine thought at first. Or at least, not for himself. He feels bad that_ I_ feel bad and thinks that he owes me for all the times I protected him when he was little, so he's going above and beyond tonight just to pay a debt that doesn't exist. Pretending to be my "darling baby brother" again and inviting me to pretend too, just to make me feel better.

But the subtle earnestness in his eyes told her there was something more to it. No, this _isn't_ just obligation; he genuinely wants to share this with me. But it's not just an emotional band-aid, either. It's a gesture of faith, a preview of things to come. Even though the distance between us hasn't been completely bridged yet – and maybe won't be for a long time – Ender believes that someday it _will_ be.

And he's anticipating it. _Hoping_ for it. He misses the years that were taken from us, and he wants them back just as much as I do. And this is his way of telling me.

All of this flashed through her mind in seconds, and she couldn't help the slow, appreciative grin that came to her face as she looked back at him. "What?" she teased. "You mean being serenaded by lullabies didn't make you feel enough like a three year old? And now you're trying to make _me_feel like a preschooler too?"

Ender shrugged. "Just for tonight, and only if you want to. Unless you still snore," he added, eyeballing her with exaggerated suspicion.

"I do _not_ snore!" she said, outraged. "And I _never_ have. You're just making it up to be a pill."

"How would you know? You can't hear yourself when you're asleep." He gave her a placating smile. "But it's a polite kind of snore, so I guess it's not a big deal anyway."

She made a face at him, stood up to grab a pillow off her own bed and marched back, bopping his shoulder aside. "Shut up and scoot over, turkey lips. And don't you dare hog the covers."

Both their beds were twin-sized, so it was a tight fit. But when they lay on their sides and faced the same direction they settled in more comfortably – Ender facing the wall, Valentine at his back, and both content to feel the warm presence of the other next to them.

She yawned again. "Goodnight, my weary not-so-wee flipperling."

"'Night."

"And Ender?"

"Mm?"

"No more nightmares tonight. That's an order."

Ender turned back to look at her, eyebrows raised. "Who died and made you hegemon?"

"A big sister doesn't _need_ to be hegemon to order her brother around, smartass. And I mean it." She feigned a glare, poking his legs with her toe under the covers. "I don't want you thrashing around like a lunatic and kicking me in your sleep."

He rolled his eyes and nudged the attacking foot away. "All right, _fine_, Your Bossiness. I will do my best to keep my warped subconscious in check for the rest of the night, despite the fact that it's my subconscious and therefore can't really be controlled at all."

"Promise?"

"I promise."

"Good." Valentine leaned over, pressing a goodnight kiss to her brother's forehead.

Ender closed his eyes, and smiled.


End file.
